Prestige Consultants Lag In Employer List

by John A. ByrnePoets & QuantsAuthor on May 14, 2012

If you’re a business student and in the U.S., you’d think it would be a no-brainer to want to work for one of the big three consulting powerhouses. After all, just having a short stint at McKinsey, Bain, or Boston Consulting Group on your resume is like sprinking a bit of pixie dust on it.

But a new survey by Universum, a firm that consults on employer branding strategies, found that the big three, which recruit and hrie the most elite MBAs to the field of consulting, all failed to crack the top 25 “ideal” employers of business students this year.

McKinsey & Co. comes in at a rank of 42nd. BCG finished with a rank of 37, and Bain was 63rd. Deloitte, on the other hand, was ranked fifth.

UPDATED MBA STUDENT RANKINGS OF IDEAL EMPLOYERS TO COME OUT IN JULY

Universum is expected to release its rankings based on MBA student surveys in July. This list is based on surveys to undergraduate students. Last year, McKinsey was ranked second among MBA students as the most “ideal” employer, just behind Google. BCG was ranked fifth and Bain sixth (see Google Tops MBA Most Wanted List).

The largest recruiters of MBAs in finance did considerably better with business students overall than the big three consulting giants. J.P. Morgan finished sixth; Goldman Sachs came in ninth, Morgan Stanley 15th, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch was 18th.

The big winner among business students was fairly predictable: Google, closely followed by Apple, Walt Disney Co., Ernst & Young, and Deloitte. Rounding out this year’s top ten are 6. J.P. Morgan, 7. Nike, 8. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 9. Goldman Sachs, and 10. KPMG.

VIEWS OF STUDENTS DIVERGE BY THE SUBJECTS THEY STUDY

More interesting, perhaps, are the divergent views of business students with those studying engineering and other fields. While business students ranked Ernst & Young fourth, for example, the accounting firm didn’t even make the top 100 among students who study either science or engineering. And among humanities’ students, E&Y was 86th, 82 places below its rank by business students.

To come up with the list, Universum surveyed students at 318 universities and got 59,643 of them to respond. All together, the responding students provided 207,435 employer evaluations. The survey was conducted from November of 2011 to March of 2012.